


(are there still) beautiful things

by blanchards



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, I cannot be held responsible for my typos, Idiots in Love, M/M, Modern AU, Mutual Pining, Pining, Sharing a Bed, also its like 3am, no beta you know the drill, they're gay and clueless your honour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27678337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanchards/pseuds/blanchards
Summary: The first time he learnt the layout of Zuko’s street, it was a diagram drawn for him on a napkin - now it resides easily in his mind. Left after the stop sign, through a back passageway to cut the journey shorter. He’s walked these same roads a hundred ways, a hundred times, often alone, but sometimes with a friend, hands swinging a little too close. He's never thought twice of it. He's walked these roads a hundred times, but tonight, he runs.The ballad of Sokka and Zuko, told over thirteen years.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 62
Kudos: 351





	(are there still) beautiful things

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so _technically_ it's fourteen years, but they don't meet in the first year and thirteen had a better ring to it. Title is a taylor swift lyric because I know my audience. Enjoy!

Sokka is six years old when he first accompanies his mother to the domestic refuge centre she volunteers at. He hangs off her arm as she drops off food and supplies. The building is dark and smells like chemicals and dust, Sokka decides he doesn’t like it then and there.

He’s seven when he meets Zuko, the shy boy with the sleek black ponytail. He’s trying to coax him into playing hide and seek together whilst his mother helps to fill out paperwork. He’s a little timid at first, much preferring to read his book instead, but after Sokka sticks his tongue out at him and they run around each other for half an hour, he decides that they’re now best friends. What follows is a cacophony of rambunctious laughter, yells and screams - fearless and gleeful - at a highly inappropriate decibel. He marks it a successful afternoon. When his mother comes to collect him to go home, Sokka watches the other woman she’s stood with, as his new friend immediately goes to hold her hand. The other lady is very beautiful, but her eyes look sad, she looks tired in the way that his dad sometimes is after long days at work. Zuko grins at him as they wave goodbye, and Sokka forgets all about it. 

Eight, and Zuko is his favourite person in the whole world. He’s much more fun to play with than Katara, who cries when he pushes her over. He looks shaken the first time it happens, but when Sokka has stopped laughing and leans over to pull him up with a kind smile, something in his expression changes to gleeful determination as he pulls the other boy down with him. Sokka wonders why Zuko had ever seemed afraid, of course he’d never hurt him on purpose, but ultimately decides it doesn’t matter. Zuko is just a bit odd like that - but he’s still his best friend. The pretty lady that stands and watches them wears an expression that Sokka doesn’t understand yet, but she smiles when he catches her eye. He smiles back. 

A week after his ninth birthday, Sokka’s mother dies in a car accident. Two days after that, he begs his father to take him to the centre to see Zuko. His father is grieving too, they all are, but Sokka doesn’t want to be in a house where dinner times are now stilted, and the sound of crying floats through the air. The once unpleasant and dimly lit building is now a comforting change. It reminds him of his mother. Zuko smiles when he sees Sokka, wide and bright, but scrunches his nose up immediately when Sokka doesn’t smile back. The pretty lady is the first to hug him, she smells like cigarettes and lilies, a little too sweet - but she strokes his hair and hushes him, and Sokka doesn’t mind. They don't play sports, or hide and seek, or tag, for a few days. They just sit on the little bed in Zuko’s family’s room and Zuko shows him all his favourite books. They talk for hours, and when they’re done, Sokka rests his back against the wall. It’s then that he starts to cry. He isn’t sure how long they’re there for, but at some point he’s wrapped into a hug, as tight and secure as a child can manage; it says _I understand._ They stay like that forever and Sokka isn’t sure why, but when they finally pull away, Zuko is crying too. 

At eleven, there’s a familiar face in his classroom. His teacher, a tall and bossy woman, tells them he’s transferred from the private school one town over. Sokka wonders, in passing, why he left. But it doesn’t really matter, because now Zuko sits next to him and they eat their free school lunches together, and suddenly Sokka doesn’t dislike school as much as he did before. Zuko helps him with his reading and he explains the maths questions he’s too embarrassed to ask about. Sokka isn’t sure why his friend hates asking for help, but he helps him nonetheless and the thankful smiles are worth it. They fall easily back into step with how they were at the refuge centre. They get in trouble more than once for talking during lessons and Zuko flinches when he’s shouted at, Sokka doesn’t ask why. 

His twelfth birthday is spent watching movies and eating pizza, with his family and with Zuko. Sokka watches his friend be dropped off that afternoon by an angry looking man in a huge black car; he isn’t sure what happened to the kind but sad woman that used to stroke their hair. He tries to broach the subject later that night, whispering amongst the darkness and ruffled sounds of sheets. The response he gets is instantaneous, the feeling of a shoulder, suddenly frozen and tense beside him. That’s when Sokka decides some things are better left unsaid. He opts to hold Zuko’s hand instead - and he might be imagining it, but he swears he hears a quiet sob. The next day it’s like it never happened, Zuko waves goodbye as the angry man lays on his horn unnecessarily outside. Sokka waves back - and he tries to ignore the way his friend’s once bright smile no longer quite reaches his eyes. 

The year that Sokka turns thirteen, Zuko stops coming to school. Two whole seasons pass before they see each other again. Sokka begins to wonder if he ever will. He does, eventually, but the difference in his friend makes his stomach churn awfully. He’s back; with the addition of a large, mottled red scar that now stretches out along half of his face. Sokka isn’t the same naïve child he was when they met all those years ago, he has a pretty confident suspicion as to what ( _whom_ ) is responsible for it. Still, he makes small talk and distractions, he fends off any of the other children’s curious glances - the whispers and sneers cut through him just as much. Sokka gets into his first fight that year. There’s something gentle and distant in his friend's face as he helps him clean the blood from his nose, Sokka tries desperately to think why the expression looks so familiar to him. Zuko's uncle picks him up from school now, he doesn’t say a word.

When he gets his heart broken for the first time at fifteen, Zuko does as well. For Sokka it’s a kind, soft spoken girl with tan skin and long waves of hair; an exchange student moving back home. For Zuko it’s the dour but beautiful girl he’s known all his life, and she raises just a single eyebrow at him when he tells her his reasons are bigger than the both of them. (She keeps his explanation to herself, as promised.) Sokka seems more surprised than anyone when he hears the news, Zuko’s break up timed almost perfectly with his own, but he doesn’t let himself falter. He drags them out to the field behind his house and they lie on their backs, legs crossed over one another, staring at the sky. He laments the trappings of young love in between pointing out constellations, and feels the way Zuko hangs on his every word. His friend doesn’t seem to have much to say of his own failed romance, that’s okay - Sokka fills in the gaps where it must still be too raw for him, he thinks can talk enough for the both of them. He does. 

At sixteen, Sokka prefers coffee. He has no reason to waste as much time as he does in the Jasmine Dragon tea shop. But at sixteen, Zuko’s uncle buys the building, and suddenly after-school evenings spent in the library shift to a particularly sunny corner just off Caldera Street, physics questions puzzled out over wooden tables and steaming cups. Sometimes Sokka fairs them alone; sometimes a tall, dark haired barista leans over and pulls faces from behind the stacks of paper. It’s a comfortable almost-silence. The shuffling of worksheets and a low, crackling hum of the radio, the gentle ring of a bell every time someone steps over the threshold. The shop doesn’t get that much custom yet, but Sokka’s addiction to hot chocolate and the sound of his friend's laughter must pay at least half their bills. When Zuko shuffles through the emerald painted door one day, late home from class, and slides into the booth opposite him, Sokka knows better than to ask questions. Thick waves are tousled out of place where a hand has repeatedly run through them, laughter once warm and free is now sharp and cold. Vacant stares and hollow replies find Sokka reaching across the table to intertwine their fingers. A familiar action, it says _I’m here_ . It speaks of two-thousand kind reassurances, secrets shared, promises kept, and a cold dark afternoon in a domestic refuge shelter; it says _I understand._ The other hand grips back. They share a look, they share a drink, and, not that he’d admit it to anyone but his pillow, the faint red warmth across his cheeks may be something they have in common too. 

Mid-December; the wind bites and the flood of rain is unrelenting. Somewhere far away and impossibly close, half caught conversations and car horns create a wall of sound. The ice stings, the lights glow, Sokka is seventeen, and his lungs are on fire. The first time he learnt the layout of Zuko’s street, it was a diagram drawn for him on a napkin - now it resides easily in his mind. Left after the stop sign, through a back passageway to cut the journey shorter. He’s walked these same roads a hundred ways, a hundred times, often alone, but sometimes with a friend, hands swinging a little too close. He's never thought twice of it. He's walked these roads a hundred times, but tonight, he runs.

He’d seen it within minutes, plastered over social media; photos of his best friend, hands tangled in hair, hair connecting to a face and hair belonging to a man. When you know someone for ten years, you learn a couple things: their favourite song, what foods they hate, the time of day they rise. You learn what books they’ve read a million times. You learn if coming out via a social media post is something they’d be behind. And you learn if the answer to that is _no_. Sokka didn’t need to see the comments before he was tearing out the door, storming down the road, hail slashing at his face. His blood could rival lava, boiling in his veins.

It’s not like he didn’t see it coming, he’d logged the hundreds of lingering glances and hesitant smiles. He’d watched the way women seemed to almost pass through Zuko, the way Mai looked almost sympathetic when he’d mentioned their break up. He was his best friend, and for all the shit he got about being clueless, Sokka wasn’t blind. He could, perhaps, be penalized for wilful ignorance though. If he was being honest, every dead giveaway was in fact acknowledged, but it was also promptly buried. Harboured in the deepest depths of Sokka’s mind, the place reserved for all his dangerous thoughts, every single one of them beginning with the words _what if we._ He didn’t entertain the idea, not when he had a choice over it - dreaming in that way would only lead to heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak you can try to quickly mend, you can shrug away and laugh off in time, the kind that lingers only quietly, that keeps you awake but only sometimes, that suffocates you gently. Heartbreak that kills you slowly. That’s the kind of loss that you never see and only feel, that keeps you nodding and smiling as it breaks you piece by piece. Sokka learnt at thirteen not to want, that it was not much more than a fruitless endeavour, a danger. But if he lets himself desire now, then all he wanted was for things to stay exactly as they were. Luck hardly ever favours those who need it most. But he follows the directions like clockwork to the house, to the door, to the boy with red rimmed eyes, they crash like waves longing for the shore. He holds him tight in his arms in case he might just disappear. He holds him. He tries to promise things won’t change. 

It takes three years for Sokka to break his promise, then at twenty, he finally does. It happens slowly then all at once. It starts with a train journey, two cities over, to a cramped apartment with no discernible heating system. It starts with a sofa: hard as rock, barely holding together and a bedroom down the hall with a twin bed. It starts with an apologetic smile at 2:30 am, a tall tan figure leaning against the door frame as he has a wave of genius. Sokka’s ideas sometimes worked a little better in theory, but he’s not sure that Zuko minds. 

The room is still cold, they’re laid under every blanket he owns, but objectively this is still a fact. He knows it from the way the air cuts to his bones when he steps out to go to the toilet and he curses his cheap rent for all the misfortune it brings him in exchange. Upon his return journey, this falters. His lack of body heat is subsidised with kinetic energy, radiating from his chest as it beats at remarkable speed. His eye-line stays fixated on the sight of his best friend: strewn across his bed, delicately carved features lost amongst waves of dark hair, long limbs wrapping around sheets invitingly and pink lips, slightly parted, emitting soft breaths. There’s a single streak of silver illuminating the room and with some great poetic justice it lies gently across his face. The notion of what it is to breathe is suddenly lost on Sokka, who steadies himself on the post and internally berates his subconscious. He wills it to shut up. In the two years since he’d moved away, distance _had_ made his heart grow fonder but it had also cleared his mind, and he was every bit as grateful for both outcomes. Forgetting Zuko, he thinks, would be a torturous existence, but he was hardly unwelcoming of the chance to start a fresh life away from his unrequited feelings. A fool might have mistaken this newfound distance for acceptance, someone with less insight might have assumed Sokka to have moved on. The truth was much less kind. The truth left him speechless in the middle of the night, casting periodic glances over his friend’s sleeping form, too wracked with guilt over his feelings to crawl back beside him under the guise of acting platonically. For an incredulous moment, Sokka wonders if he might be doomed to stay stood in limbo until sunrise. A tired voice derails his thoughts.

“Are you just going to stand there or are you coming back to sleep?” 

It’s accompanied by eyes fluttering open, they don’t look unkind but they are resolutely focused on Sokka. He decides staring at the wall is far more fascinating. The soft hand suddenly tugging at his own, pulling him back towards the mattress is unexpected to say the least. Without a fully formulated escape plan, he’s left with very little he can do other than yelp as with one final determined yank he goes tumbling head first onto the bed. The image of his limbs tangled up with Zuko’s is usually reserved for quiet moments in his own mind and not much else, but this is painfully, mortifyingly real. He scrambles furiously for purchase on bedding that isn’t taken up by his friend’s sprawled out form, and he feels his face start to flush when he comes up empty. The body beneath him simply laughs. It’s a rare laugh, one that often goes unheard by people that aren’t him: a low, rasping chuckle, drowsy and warm, it’s accompanied by half lidded eyes, glittering bronze. It’s a moment so intimately theirs and no one else's, Sokka wishes he could live in it. Two icy cold hands find his waist and gently shove him over to the right side of the bed, he wonders if he’s imagining the tenderness in which they do so. He isn’t imagining the way one of the hands lingers. He isn’t imagining the way Zuko turns onto his side in the effort to keep it there comfortably. He isn't imagining the fact he doesn’t stop him. 

When a comfortable silence washes over the room, all Sokka can hear the blood rushing in his ears. The hand stays, and it’s an uncharacteristically bold move. He wonders when Zuko got so confident, wonders if he’s dreaming, he decides to be inspired and rests his own palm atop of it. He prays he’s not misreading this whole damn thing. 

“I missed you.” 

It’s his own voice, but it’s nearly unrecognisable. It ebbs through the quiet so carefully, as if he’s not completely sure he wants to be heard. He is, regardless. 

A lean. A shift. A hesitant pull from the hand on his side. A dark curtain obscuring his peripheral vision. A halfway movement that asks a question. The answer isn’t a difficult one. Zuko tastes intoxicating, like mint and jasmine, and Sokka suddenly wishes everything else in the world could as well. Two soft lips work against his own, he runs his thumb along a cheekbone and the skin beneath his fingers shivers in response. There’s a few seconds of bumping noses and teeth before they set into a rhythm, slow and languid. Easy, syrupy kisses, unrushed. The hand once holding his waist is now carving out shapes with practiced tenderness. Fingers card through hair, content sighs against lips are punctuated with gentle touches, he’s learning to breathe all over again. It’s a small lifetime before they pull apart.

Zuko has so many unreadable expressions, indistinguishable, purposeful. Even in all their years, Sokka is still trying and failing to map and identify them all. He almost wishes he was looking at one right now. Instead he’s met with the eyes and smile of an open book, an occasion so infrequent that it ought to be coveted. Sleepy and vulnerable, and the anxiety beyond the surface is undeniable. It’s a look of wanting and affection but altogether it’s so much more. It’s laughter and running around and pulling each other back up. It's leaning on a shoulder, it’s hugging in a dark room, it’s wiping blood from faces and staring at the stars. It’s hot chocolate over homework and running through bitter winter winds. It’s unconditional. It’s _understanding_. He’d like to mark it a new discovery but somehow, Sokka thinks he’s seen it his whole life.

“I love you.” he whispers through the memories.

“I love you, too.” they whisper back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you like, I'm on tumblr @[tysukis](https://tysukis.tumblr.com/) <3


End file.
